My one liner: If Huckleberry Finn gave you pleasure as a child, this collection of letters and notes of Mark Twain, will give you as much pleasure now. 

Take profits on your stock positions when they have gone up.  Not all new technologies are great investments.  Heed the advice of technical experts. Due diligence is no substitute for “friends and family”.  Some basic investment propositions that are as true today as they were 150 years ago. And Mark Twain was a pretty disastrous investor. 

Some time in the 1860s he took a stock tip from his acquaintance Mr Camp, “a bold man who was always making big fortunes in ingenious speculations and losing them again in the course of six months by other speculative ingenuities”.  The tip was to buy Hale and Norcross, and he purchased 50 shares at $300 a share, putting in 20% himself, with the rest on margin.  He also persuaded his brother, Orion, to come in for half the amount, and awaited the cheque.  Predictably enough, Hale and Norton went through the roof hitting $6,000 per share.  Inexplicably Twain waited for Orion’s money before selling out.  Predictably enough Hale and Norton came crashing back down.  Blasted through the margin and into Twain’s equity, and “at last when I got out I was badly crippled”.  Only later does Twain find out that his brother had sent the money in gold (rather than a cheque which any “normal human being” would have done) to a nearby hotel, and the clerk had deposited it in the safe and forgotten about it.

Then there was the foray into patents. Twain acquires a patent for $15,000 from an “old and particular” friend who had neglected to mention to him that it was worthless. The deal was that Twain would pay a further $500 per month to the friend who would do the manufacturing and selling.  In his colourful humour Twain tells us “that raven flew out of the Ark regularly every thirty days and the dove didn’t report for duty.”

Or the steam engine, which “another old friend” told him would get out 99% of all the steam that was in a pound of coal.  He takes the advice of a coal and steam expert who shows him using a book of “figures that made me drunk and dizzy” which the machine could not come within 90% of the claimed steam release.  Despite the expert advice Twain proceeds and engages the inventor because “maybe the book was mistaken”.  Five thousand dollars later, the inventor comes up with a machine which saved 1% steam, but “you could do it with a teakettle.”  Undeterred, Twain now fancies himself as an enthusiast on steam and takes some stock in a Hartford company which is a making a new kind of steam pulley.  “That pulley pulled thirty two thousand dollars out of my pocket in sixteen months, then went to pieces.”

These are just a few anecdotes from a collection of letters and notes which constitute the autobiography of Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens), put together from 1870 up to his death in 1910, and edited into a book by Charles Neider in 1959.  He is not afraid to admit his follies, and he is not afraid to admit his vanity:

“This Autobiography of mine is a mirror and I am looking at myself in it all the time.  Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back...and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation I set these things down in my Autobiography.”

We learn that Twain was a highly proficient billiards and pool player. And with our modern world obsessed with level playing fields and standardised rules he gives us the story of the billiards table at Jackass Gulch, a dilapidated former mining town which the gold deposits were now exhausted. The saloon is of a “ruined and rickety character struggling for life, but doomed.”  And the pool table reflected this, with chipped balls, the cloth darned and patched, the table’s surface undulated with headless cues that “had the curve of a parenthesis”.  And Twain postulates that it would be much more entertaining to have the great champions who grace the competition tables of Madison Square pit their skills against Texas Tom of Jackass Gulch on the bad billiard outfit, where adjustments have to be made for all of  the table’s faults and inaccuracies.  Possibly some life lessons there.

And how did Twain conceive of Finn, the reckless boyhood adventurer ? Well there must have been something of the Twain about Finn.  An example comes from 1845 when a measles epidemic is claiming the lives of many children in Mark Twain’s home town.  The ten-year old Twain is so engulfed with impatience as to whether he will succumb to the epidemic that he forces the issue by deliberately sneaking into the house of his measles-infected friend and jumping into bed next to him.  Needless to say he contracts that disease, but survives by a whisker.

The book is a fascinating insight into an America which is transforming from Emerging Market to Global Superpower (“Steadily, continuously, persistently, we are Americanizing Europe, and all in good time we shall get the job perfected”).  Twain was a supporter of equality, though his language reflects what was culturally acceptable and normal in a country where slavery was still prevalent.  And he was active all the way to his death.  Although one suspects that if the death of his wife in Italy 1904 was a near-fatal emotional blow to him, then the loss of his daughter Jean in 1909 probably sapped his remaining will to live.

This is the Wikipedia link for the book.

David Eagleman - Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlife (2009)

My one liner: These are extremely short stories, maximum 3 pages long, and hence very easy to read on the go. Hilarious, thought-provoking, moving, sad, and certainly not overtly religious. An experiment that went right.

 This is a book which makes us hold up a mirror at our own behaviour, our own existence, and our own values.  The method is ingenious.  By creating the trope
of the hypothetical afterlife, David Eagleman allows an observation of humanity from  outside the confines of the world we live in.  The tales, including some fables reminiscent of childhood readings of Aesop, are brief and colourful, some are morality stories, some motivational self-help guides, others just set off emotions of sadness or happiness.
 
Take for example our natural desire for familiarity. To be amongst people we know and care about, the communities we inhabit, the friends and colleagues we trust. In “Circle of Friends” you only gradually realise you are in an afterlife
after a certain period of time. Because initially everything looks like the world you lived in. You say goodbye to the wife and kids in the morning, leave for the office, where you spend the day working with your usual colleagues. But it does eventually dawn on you that you are in the afterlife. Why ? Because you come to realise that this world is populated only by people whom you’ve met before (whether friends, relations, colleagues, or fleeting acquaintances).  Although initially you like the attention you get from those around you, everybody is friendly, and you get to renew old acquaintances, you soon get depressed. 
Depressed because you come to notice an absence of crowds of unknown people, of new things to learn or explore. 
 
“You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting.  But no one listens or sympathises with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.”
 
Or why do we seek recognition, fame, our name in lights, the need to be the best-known fish in our particular pond ? Might there be a downside ? Well yes, a big one in the afterlife posited by “Metamorphosis”. You see, there are three deaths. And you have to wait in the waiting-room until the third death.  Death One is when the body ceases to function.  Death Two is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third death is some point in the future which is the last time on earth that your name is spoken.  Until then you stay in the waiting room, which basically resembles an airport departure lounge.  
  
“The gray-haired man at the vending machine was lionized as a war hero, then demonized as a warlord, and finally canonized as a necessary firebrand between two moments in history.  He waits with aching heart for his statue to fall.”

 In “Incentive” the incentive to constantly self improve and fulfil your potential during your life is clear.  Because you will have to spend your entire afterlife in the company of many many alternative versions of “You”.  But only the ones who in alternative parallel lives achieved greater success, for example because they reflect good decisions you should have made rather than bad decisions you actually made.  Or because of an instance where you didn’t fully motivate yourself to achieve a task, but did do so in a parallel life.  You will constantly be reminded of what might have been, so be motivated now, and you will have fewer “Yous” above you in the afterlife hierarchy.

 That’s three stories given away, but there are 37 more.  Eagleman is undoubtedly multi-talented; his professional speciality is neuroscience. And to cap it all I note from his Wikipedia entry that Italy's Style magazine named Eagleman one of the "Brainiest, Brightest Idea Guys for 2012" and featured him on the cover. Yeah, one of them.

Here is the Wikipedia link to the book.

Paul Auster: Sunset Park (2010)

My one liner: Paul Auster is my favourite American author.  As with much of his work, appeals to NYC-lovers.  An abandoned house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn provides Miles Heller the setting to work through his tormented past.  A vignette of financial-crisis-ridden America.
 
Miles Heller, 28, has run away from a sad past, and finds himself washed up in a dead-end job in the middle of recession-plagued Florida.

“The work is called trashing out, and he belongs to a four-man crew employed by the Dunbar Realty Corporation, which subcontracts its “home preservation” services to the local banks that now own the properties in question.  The sprawling flatlands of south Florida are filled with these orphaned structures, and because it is in the interests of the banks to resell them as quickly as possible, the vacated houses must be cleaned, repaired, and made ready to be shown to prospective buyers.”

A roadside teenage bust-up that led to the death of his step-brother, eventually made him quit his degree and his New York home seven years ago, and he has not spoken to his father or step-mother since. His mother, an actress, left home when he was young, and although throughout the story he maintains some contact with her, it is a relationship of exceptionally low quality. 
 
In Florida he “adopts” teenage lover Pilar Sanchez, a girl from a working class and somewhat unsettled Latino family, and encourages her to fulfil her academic potential and apply to Ivy League schools.  You feel that he is using her to fill a missing piece of his own life.  Then the bombshell. A blackmail threat by Pilar’s big sister to Miles. Forcing Miles to go on the run again.  

Heller and his father are both baseball fanatics, and the book is peppered with baseball stats which to the non-afficionado can be a little bewildering. But there is a point that Auster wants to make.  Baseball player Herb Score’s obituary appears in the paper – his career was cut short in 1957 by an on-field injury, and the obituary says that his whole life was plagued by one unfortunate incident after another.  Contrast another player “Lucky Lohrke” who, still alive, has survived the most unbelievable accidents both during and after the war.  Auster is telling us that life is as much fate as it is will.

Nathan Bing is the ever-present character who is the connector of the plot. Miles’ childhood friend, still living in NYC, proprietor of the bric-a-brac store “Hospital for Broken Things ”, and provider to Miles of regular updates about his father and step-mother.  

“He is the warrior of outrage, the champion of discontent, the militant debunker of contemporary life who dreams of forging a new reality from the ruins of a failed world.  Unlike most contrarians of his ilk, he does not believe in political action.”. 

Forced by economic reality to look for a new apartment he comes across an abandoned house in Sunset Park, and persuades Ellen the real estate agent who shows it to him to squat with him there.  All they need to do is find
two more “tenants”.  And given Miles’ need to leave Florida, the timing is perfect for Miles to join the squat. He will be back for Pilar when the time is right, he assures her.
 
The story takes us to Brooklyn, the inhabitants of the house in Sunset Park, and their inter-relationships, including the inevitable amorous liaisons.  And of course it takes Miles geographically closer to his father, who is having his own marital issues and other personal and professional setbacks.    Will he be able to reconcile with his father ? Will he confess to what happened on that fateful night of the death of his step-brother ? Will he be able to find happiness with Pilar ? Even if you do believe that life is mostly fate, does that really give you a licence to opt out entirely ?

Auster’s characters are always real.  Even the peripheral ones have substance, which means that the digressions into their lives are also worth making, even when this does not directly move the plot forward.  A short and easy read book, but you feel like you have covered alot of ground by the end, and you have a
better insight into contemporary America.

The wikipedia link to the book is here.

My one liner: Such a short book, and so much inspiration to be drawn. A master class in brevity.  

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature on the back of the publication of this book in 1951.  If you have read this book, re-read it: you will get 100 times more from it than the first time round, especially if it was in your younger days.  If you have never read it, do so: it will not take much time.

The story of an old man’s fight, no, change that, relationship, with the immutable laws of nature; his own old age and physical decline; the experience and intuition that come from his years at sea; the challenge that he takes on to lead a large fish that he has hooked; shifting elements of the sea, the stars, the moon and the sun; man’s futile attempts to master that which cannot be mastered.

 The Old Man is a Havana fisherman, who has come out of an eight-four day barren period when he did not make a single catch.  But he continues to believe in the art and skill of his profession:

“He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water.  He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level of darkness there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there.  Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.  But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more.  But who knows ? Maybe today. Every day is a new day.  It is better to be lucky.  But I would rather be exact.  Then when the luck comes you are ready.”

And the big fish does eventually arrive.  And it takes the bait. And the hook sticks.  But, it is so big that it can last for days.  It swims further and further out to sea, dragging the boat with it. So it is now Man against Fish, a battle of wills between two worthy adversaries.

‘Fish,’ he said softly, ‘I’ll stay with you until I am dead’. He’ll stay with me too, I suppose, the old man thought, and he wished it to be light.  It was now in the time before daylight, and he pushed against the wood to be warm.  I can do it as long as he can, he thought.

 By the way, here is an outstanding animated movie of the book. Animation done in the old style without CGI.

What is it that drives the Old Man to pursue his adversary, when experience tells him that he is taking a big risk ? Perhaps it is his Ego.  I certainly think so.  The Old Man claims to have “attained humility”:

 “He was too simple to wonder when he had attained humility.  But he knew he had attained it and he knew it was not disgraceful and it carried no loss of pride.”  I think that Hemingway is showing us that total mastery of Ego and attainment of Humility is much much harder than we think.

 As is mastery of the elements and the natural world.

 But whatever his faults and ultimate lack of judgment, we cannot but help
feel admiration for the Old Man.  For he has reached a level of self-control and discipline which most of us can only dream of achieving. I have addressed this type of discipline in previous posts on Stoicism (here) and Shibumi (here and here).

 In the case of the Old Man, it is his resilience and mental strength to move
on from setbacks which marks him out:

 “ Now, he said to himself, look at the lashing on the knife and see if it has been cut.  Then get your hand in order because there is still more to come. ‘I wish I had a stone for the knife,’ the old man said after he had elevated the lashing on the oar butt.  ‘I should have brought a stone.’  You should have brought many things, he thought. But you did not bring them old man. Now is not the time to think of what you did not have.  Think of what you can do with what there is."

So much intensity and so many directions of reflection packed into such a short novel. On who Man worships, we have our Deities, but we also have our Mortal Heroes and we worship both.  The Old Man does not seem particularly religious, but he invokes God to give him strength and luck.  Yet he is also a baseball fan from the DiMaggio era of the New York Yankees.  So, we wonder whom he truly worships.

“There are enough problems without sin.  Also I have no understanding of it.  I have not understanding of it, and I’m not sure I believe in it.  Perhaps it was a sin to kill the fish, I suppose it was even though I did it to keep me alive and feed many people.  But then everything is a sin.  Do not think about sin.  It is much too late for that and there are people who are paid to do it, let them think about it.  You were born to be a fisherman, and the fish was born to be a fish.  San Pedro was a fisherman, as was the father of the great Di Maggio.”

Ultimately this is a book which leaves as many questions unanswered as it actually closes.  It is as paradoxical as an Impressionist painting. At a distance it covers a landscape or scene of astonishing breadth with extreme clarity.  But at a close up you see the artists brush strokes which are more like pointers and clues to a deeper world beyond the canvas.

 And that, I suppose, is the genius of Hemingway.

The Wikipedia link for the book is here.

My one liner: How do societies adapt to Disruptive Change? Exerting discipline through fear. Labour skills reflect society’s needs. Why “National Patrimony” matters.  Being local versus global depends on society’s current needs. We are crucially dependent on our modern communications networks. Opportunity Cost determines Resource Allocation. Life Experiences give us important intuitive skills. Just some of the lessons learned from World War Z.

As 2012 draws to a close, I have taken the opportunity to publish the second in the occasional series, Lessons from Fiction.  The subject is “How Society adapts to Disruptive Change”

The book which gives us some rich insights is World War Z (2006) by Max Brooks.  Written as the account of an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission, World War Z is a series of post-war interviews with all sorts of people from all over the world who lived through a fictional apocalyptic war.

The war was a 10-year conflict against Zombies, following a Zombie pandemic which originated in China (and was originally covered up by the Chinese government), spread to South America via the illegal donor trade, and finally came to prominence following an outbreak in South Africa.  Zombies are devoid of intelligence and are motivated only by the desire to consume human flesh.  Shortly after being bitten by a zombie, a human will “die” and then become a zombie itself.  The only way to destroy them is to destroy the brain.  They do not tire, and are as strong as the humans they infect.  At peak, there were 200 million zombies threatening humanity, and the book alludes to the human race coming to the brink of extinction.

Here is a YouTube simulation of a Zombie attack (unrelated to the book), originating in Peru.

Which is obviously quite an unlikely thing to actually happen. However, it got me thinking what might be real-world applications.

An interesting paper on the mathematics of containing a zombie outbreak is here.  Its major conclusion is that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario of the total collapse of society.  The paper points to some possible applications of the analysis, including martyrdom-based religious extremism.  Is that why we observe quick and aggressive military strikes against alleged terrorist strongholds ?

And what of the current financial crisis ? “Zombie banks” was a term first coined by Edward Kane during the Savings and Loans crisis of the late 1980s. It describes an insolvent financial institution that continues to exist simply because it benefits from government guarantees of its ability to repay its debts.  Such banks become a drain on the resources of the state whilst fulfilling no useful asset allocation function.  Many commentators argue, and I agree, that much of our current financial system suffers from this malaise.  Modelling the negative systemic impact of keeping zombie banks afloat (as opposed to letting them go) would I think be an interesting field of research. 

But that’s a digression.  Back to the book. The personal accounts tell of people’s survival stories, their roles in discovering or overcoming the threat, and the social, geopolitical, economic and physical changes that people, nations, the environment went through during that period.

Clearly an extreme fictional tale, but extremely well-researched, such that we may draw some interesting conclusions as to how societies behave during times of extreme disruption.

Discipline can be exercised through Fear

The Russian army had its own way of ensuring that its soldiers would fight for the cause.  It stripped the soldiers of their own humanity, and their ability to decide for themselves.  The result was total submission to the mission. An insight into how repressive societies coerce and co-opt their citizens into the national project, whatever that may be.  The 20th century saw this on a grand scale, with millions of people induced to oppress and murder to compatriots so that they become collaborators in the scheme of the dictator.  Decimation also incidentally appears in Roman and Greek mythology.  The three Parcae were the Roman female personifications of fate (see previous post on this subject).  Nona spun the thread of life, Decima measured the thread of life and Morta cut the thread of life.  Not much research available on the internet, but it makes one wonder why the name of the preserver of life refers to partitioning into tenth parts.

“To decimate… I used to think it meant just to wipe out, cause horrible damage, destroy… It actually means to kill by a percentage of ten, one out of every ten must die… and that’s exactly what they did to us…

The Spetznaz had us assemble on the parade ground, full dress uniform no less… ‘You spoiled children think democracy is a God-given right.  You expect it, you demand it ! Well, now you’re going to get your chance to practice it’

… ‘What did he mean ?’

We would be the ones to decide who would be punished. Broken up into groups of ten, we would have to vote on which one of us was going to be executed. And then we… the soldiers, we would be the ones to personally murder our friends… We could have said no, could have refused and been shot ourselves, but we didn’t.  We went right along with it. We all made a conscious choice and because that choice carried such a high price, I don’t think anyone ever wanted to make another one again.  We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go.”

Labour skills reflect Society’s needs

When disruption comes, the labour market changes abruptly.  In a Zombie war, modern weapons do not work. Additionally, say goodbye to modern manufacturing methods, large scale agricultural production, non-essential service occupations, mass-media as a leisure pursuit.

Gradual disruptions could also have this effect; if you believe that environmental or economic changes will in the future make people less mobile, then skills which emphasise real production and output will be more valuable than those which value intangible services or agency.

“You should have seen some of the “careers” listed on our first employment census; everyone was some version of an “executive”, a “representative”, an “analyst”, or a “consultant”, all perfectly suited to the pre-war world, but all totally inadequate for the present crisis.  We needed carpenters, masons, machinists, gunsmiths.  We had those people, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were necessary.  The first labor survey stated that over 65 percent of the present civilian workforce were classified F-6, possessing no valued vocation.  We required a massive retraining program.  In short, we needed to get a whole lot of white collars dirty.”

One by-product of this could be an improved sense of emotional well-being, with people feeling that what they do is socially useful.  The evidence on this is not clear-cut either way.  Some studies suggest that once basic human needs are met above a certain level (measured by GDP per capita) then there is no international correlation between happiness and income, although within countries rising income is related to rising happiness (the so-called Easterlin Paradox).  Others argue that there is indeed an international correlation also.  Not for debate here, but it does seem intuitive that what people value is "relative" well-being.   In a world where everyone has more equal personal wealth (in this case because of the need to fight a common enemy), then they derive more utility from contributing to their local community. 

Certainly the author seems to imply that people are happier when they are more connected to their community.

“I met one gentleman on a coastal ferry from Portland to Seattle.  He had worked in the licensing department for an advertising agency, specifically in charge of procuring the rights to classic rock songs for television commercials.  Now he was a chimney sweep.  Given that most homes in Seattle had lost their central heat and the winters were now longer and colder, he was seldom idle.  “I help keep my neighbours warm,” he said proudly.  I know it sounds a little too Norman Rockwell, but I hear stories like that all the time.  “You see those shoes, I made them,” “That sweater, that’s my sheep’s wool,” “Like the corn ? My garden”.  That was the upshot of a more localised system.  It gave people the opportunity to see the fruits of their labour, it gave them a sense of individual pride to know that they were making a clear, concrete contribution to victory.”

The modern communications network is irreplaceable

Satellites are used for a number of civilian applications: navigation and positioning; communication (including telephony, internet, television and radio); weather forecasting; earth mapping (including agricultural yields, forestry, and geology).  Not to mention military uses.  All of our modern communication depends on them: the world as we know it would literally fall apart without them.  In the novel a team of astronauts mans the International Space Station (ISS) in order to keep a small number of satellites in orbit. The team was not guaranteed any passage back to earth, but given the importance of keeping satellites working they decided to stay on the ISS anyway….

National Patrimony determines economic well-being

One of the biggest lessons of World War Z is in my opinion the importance of a term which I think is much under-used “National Patrimony”.  The concept is has been the subject of a previous post, Why the West rules…For Now, and it refers to the accumulated store of a country’s wealth and resources.  In its narrowest definition it may consist of natural resources and financial holdings, but it should really be broadened to cover the entire endowment of attributes and heritage that a country possesses, for example its culture, national identity, homogeneity, role of government, integration with other countries.

In today’s globalised world Cuba’s isolation and self-dependence in relation to the above attributes has been very much a handicap.  In the post-apocalyptic world physical and   cultural isolation, a nationalistic mindset, disproportionate investment in healthcare, and the psychology of being accustomed to face a common adversary, all became important assets in the flourishing of Cuba as the world’s wealthiest country.  

This is surely true of any era in time.  When analysing the relative outlook and capabilities of different countries, do we not put too much emphasis on flow items (deficits / surpluses, income levels, growth items, outputs, etc) ?  Surely in any era or cycle it is the National Patrimony of a country that determines its economic well-being.

“Cases were small and immediately contained, mostly Chinese refugees and a few European businessmen.  Travel from the United States was still largely prohibited, so we were spared the initial blow of first-wave mass migration. The repressive nature of our fortress society allowed the government to take steps to ensure that the infection was never allowed to spread.  All internal travel was suspended, and both the regular army and territorial militias were mobilized.  Because Cuba had such a high percentage of doctors per capita, our leader knew the true nature of the infection weeks after the first outbreak was reported… By the time of the Great Panic, when the world finally woke up to the nightmare breaking down their doors, Cuba had already prepared itself for war… The simple fact of geography spared us the danger of large-scale, overland swarms.  Our invaders came from the sea, specifically from an armada of boat people.  Not only did they bring contagion, as we have seen throughout the world, there were also those who believed in ruling their new homes as modern-day conquistadors.”

Opportunity Cost determines Resource Allocation

The first thing that my Economics teacher at school taught us in our first lesson was: “There is only one cost which matters: Opportunity Cost.” Governments and administrators face choices all the time, since they do not have infinite resources.  In the Zombie attack the realisation that governments came to was that it was impossible to protect and save the whole population.  And, more objectively, once you have decided which cohort of the population you are going to save, then the remainder can actually be turned into an asset to fight against the threat by acting as a decoy.  In the book, all governments eventually adopted a version of the “Redeker Plan” as first developed by Paul Redeker during the apartheid era in South Africa.

Brutal and chilling, yes.  And clearly much too extreme for any peace-time decision making.  However, it does remind us government policy-making must by definition favour one group over another.  This could have profound implications in areas such as healthcare, where currently most governments do not explicitly allocate resources based on quantitative measures of their outcomes.  Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) were an early attempt at this (what will be the patients quality of life and how long will he live, if you apply a given treatment ?), and some stories in the media suggest that hospitals do operate such policies unofficially. I think that with budget constraints in the future, such resource allocation will become more explicit.  

“This is where [Paul] Redeker stepped in.  His revised Plan Orange, appropriately completed in 1984, was the ultimate survival strategy for the Afrikaner people.   No variable was ignored.  Population figures, terrain, resources, logistics… Redeker not only updated the plan to include both Cuba’s chemical weapons and his own country’s nuclear option, but also, and this is what made the “Orange Eighty-Four” so historic, the determination of which Afrikaners would be saved and which had to be sacrificed… Redeker believed that to try to protect everyone would stretch the government’s resources to the breaking point.  He compared it to survivors of a sinking ship capsizing a lifeboat that simply did not have room for them all.  Redeker had even gone so far as to calculate who should be “brought aboard”.  He included income, IQ, fertility, an entire checklist of “desirable qualities”, including the subject’s location to a potential crisis zone.  ‘The first casualty of the conflict must be our own sentimentality’ was the closing statement for his proposal, “for its survival will mean our own destruction.”  Orange Eighty-Four was a brilliant plan.  It was clear, logical, efficient, and it made Paul Redecker one of the most hated men in South Africa.”

Life Experiences give us important intuitive skills

The experience of the older generation is to be highly valued.  Regular readers of this blog will know that I rant about the inexperience of the 40-something world leaders that we have these days. What happened to the 60 and 70-year olds who have seen the world, achieved something in alternative careers, and truly understand how the world works ?  In World War Z, these were the people who understood the true ferocity of what was about to happen.  Sometimes it is just intuition.  One of the first interviews in World War Z is with a Chinese doctor called to an outbreak in Fengdu, where nobody yet understands that they are faced with a Zombie outbreak.  But one old lady senses something serious is about to happen because she has seen calamity many times before…

“I’ve never see Fengdu as anything but a cheap, kitschy tourist trap.  Of course this ancient crone’s words had no effect on me, but her tone, her anger… she had witnessed enough calamity in her years upon the earth: the warlords, the Japanese, the insane nightmare of the Cultural Revolution… she knew that another storm was coming, even if she didn’t have the education to understand it.”

And finally...

Many more accounts in the book than alluded to in this review, and much to reflect on.  Which makes this book a sci-fi / fantasy novel that is eminently accessible to the Reader on the Clapham Omnibus.

The Wikipedia link to the book is here.

There’s a movie due out in June 2013, by the way.  But it looks like it doesn’t really follow the structure of personal accounts where the outcome is already known.  It seems more like Brad Pitt Saves the World.

Which is fine I suppose. 

Here’s the trailer…

My one liner:  Manipulative behaviour always gets found out. The clues will have been clear and unambiguous once you get to the end and all is revealed in this oldie whodunit.  Some nice historical insight into post-war London also.

"People didn’t celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out.  What the newspapers showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town. Like himself, Miles Hammond thought, most people were apathetic because they could not think of it as real. But something awoke, deep down inside human beings’ hearts, when the cricket results crept back into the papers and the bunks began to disappear from the Underground. Even peace time institutions like the Murder Club...”
 
A very British crime  story set in post-war London. John Dickson Carr delivers this  locked room mystery starring Carr's detective character Dr Gideon Fell, neatly, almost surgically, as we follow a few days in the life of Miles Hammond, the principal character of the book. 
 
Hammond served in the war, but spent much of it incapacitated through diesel oil poisoning.  During the war he found out that his Uncle Charles had died, leaving his whole estate to Miles and his sister Marion.   In particular, that means that they now have a large house in the New Forest, which also contains
Uncle Charles’ extensive library.  Not now needing to work, Miles (who is also a Nobel Prize-winning historian), has taken on the task of putting the books in
order.
 
He is down in London to interview a candidate as a temporary librarian to assist with the task.  And while in town, why not attend a gathering of the Murder Club, as guest of his good friend Dr Gideon Fell ?  The Murder Club is an invitation-only soirée in a Soho restaurant where a small number of participants gets together to try and solve real-life murder conundrum brought by one of the guests. 
  
Tonight it is the turn of Professor Rigaud, and his brilliant tale of the murder of Howard Brooke in 1939 near Chartres, a French town 60km south of Paris. 
Mr Brooke lived there with his wife Georgina and son Harry (in his early
twenties). Family concern about Harry, as he wants (whimsically in his parents’eyes) to go and study painting in Paris rather than take over the family leather business.
 
And then there is Fay Seton.
 
The young attractive English secretary hired by Howard Brooke, and with whom Harry inevitably falls in love and gets engaged to. Malicious rumours about Fay Seton around the village.  Together with some altogether more sinister gossip about her:

“In Slavonic lands popular folkore credits the vampire with existence merely as an animated corpse: that is, a being confined to its coffin by day and emerging only after nightfall for its prey.  In Western Europe, notably in France, the vampire is a demon, living outwardly a normal life in the community, but capable during sleep or trance of projecting its soul in the form of straw or spinning mist to take visible shape.”

Professor Rigaud was a neighbour and friend of the Brookes, and recounts the dreadful day that Howard  Brooke was murdered, at the top of an old, forty-foot tower (the “Tour Henri Quatre”) on his estate.  The tower borders on one side straight down to the River Eure.  A sheer drop. Professor Rigaud had left Brooke unhurt and in good health at ten minutes to four at the top of the tower. His death was timed at between five past and ten past four.  
  
Stabbed in the back by his own sword-cane.  A briefcase containing 2,000 francs missing. Brooke had withdrawn the money and had been due to meet Fay Seton (to pay her off not to marry his son ??) at the top of the tower. Harry in a panic for some reason, and then sent to the tower by his mother who had felt something awful was happening. Fay Seton out for a swim in the river.  Several fragments of rock detached from the tower on the river side.  
  
Yet crucially, it was established that nobody could possibly have been with Howard Brooke during the time when he was stabbed.  
 
Back to the Murder Club, and a number of unanswered questions there too. 
In particular, none of the regular members turned up that evening.  So Professor Rigaud (much to his chagrin) has been recounting his story to the only two people who did come: Miles Hammond, and a young lady called Barabara Morell, also an invitee of a member. Indeed, Miles’ good friend Dr Gideon Fell, has not attended.
 
The plot thickens, as they say, the next day when Miles meets his interview candidate for the librarian role.  Yes, you guessed it: Fay Seton, just arrived in England.  Miles, just like Harry Brooke before him, is intrigued. There is some inexplicable quality about this woman. On the way back from London, Miles shares a train with his sister Marion, and her fiancé, the slightly plain, straight-laced Steve Curtis. He tells them the Marion and Steve the Murder Club tale of Professor Rigaud, the amazing coincidence of Fay Seton, and of his intention to hire her.  Steve, in particular, is most resistant.

But Miles is persistent, and Fay is appointed Librarian in Residence. With disastrous consequences.
 
A scream and gunshot are heard one night.  Marion Hammond is found in her bed in an extreme state of cardiac failure (although with no wound).  Dr Gideon Fell (who has his hunches) and Professor Rigaud (who by the way is also a vampire expert) are quickly on the scene.  
  
An exciting denouement sees Miles racing down to London.  A chase up the Northern Line to Bolsover Street in Camden Town, in pursuit of the absconded Fay Seton.
 
Without giving too much away this is both a detective story and a tale of Fate. 
Of how coincidence can conspire to make one person’s life a misery years after they think they have left their previous misfortunes behind.  
  
And it offers a salutary tale to those who engage in manipulative behaviour towards their fellow human beings.  You will get found out in the end. 
 
I kicked myself when the “whodunit” was revealed, because the clues were so obvious. With hindsight.  Including a whopping great clue on the front cover of the book  !

The Wikipedia link for the book is here.

My one liner: Comparable to (better than ??) Le Carré and Forsyth.  A Japanese philosophy-way of life, as practiced by a stateless assassin who is the hero of the book. And remarkably prescient about technology, terrorism, business and geo-politics.

Trevanian is one of the pseudonyms of Rodney William Whittaker, an author of several genres of fiction during the 1970s and 1980s.  Reading Shibumi over thirty years after it was first written was an interesting experience for the fact that it seems to foretell a number of events and technologies that nowadays have more fin-de-siėcle associations. 

The 1970s version of the Google Algorithm and Social Media all rolled into one is “Fat Boy”, a giant supercomputer run by the Mother Company (you need to read the novel to find out what that is): “Fat Boy contained a medley of information from all the computers in the Western World, together with a certain amount of satellite-stolen data from Eastern-bloc powers...It contained the most delicate information and the most mundane. If you lived in the industrialized West, Fat Boy had you...Programming facts into Fat Boy was the constant work of any army of mechanics and technicians, but getting useful information out of Him was a task for an artist, a person with training, touch and inspiration.”

On terrorism and geo-politics, the novel “pre-calls” 9/11, centering as it does around a plot by Islamic terrorists to down an airliner (Concorde, in this case). Some healthy torture by occupying forces. And there is a distinctly post-Cold War feel to the vested business interests, both Western and Arab, colluding to control the world’s oil supply, together with other forms of renewable energy, whilst unashamedly polluting the planet.  Torture and oh yes, the demise of Concorde as a commercially viable operation is perfectly forecast.

What is Shibumi ? The term is a Japanese word, often used in the context of gardens or architecture, to connote an understated beauty.  As applied to human qualities, it is harder to explain. I won’t be able to paraphrase, so I will quote the novel. Shibumi indicates a “great refinement underlying commonplace appearances...understanding rather than knowledge...modesty without pudency...in art...it is elegant simplicity, articulate brevity...in philosophy...it is spiritual tranquillity that is not passive; it is being without the angst of becoming...Authority without domination.” 

Nicholai Hel, the hero of the novel, resolves to strive for Shibumi at a very young age. For those familiar with Ayn Rand, there is something of the Howard Roark in Fountainhead about Hel’s austere individualism, about striving for excellence when all around him are pushing for mediocrity.

Hel was brought up in Shanghai in the 1930s. His biological father is of German and Hapsburg stock, and his mother is a Romanov Russian, Alexandra Ivanovna, who fled the revolution and became a Shanghai socialite, and who throws out the father as she has no intention of getting married.  Hel receives a classical multi-lingual artistocratic education, and his mother even allows him to become highly skilled in pure mathematics as she is told that, in the aristocratic tradition, it has no commercial value. Hel complements this by escaping during the night and hanging out with Chinese street-kids.

The Japanese invade Shanghai, and one General Takashi is billeted to take over the mansion in which Ivanovna is staying.  He agrees to let her stay on, and after her sudden death, he becomes the father figure to Hel.  Primarily he trains Hel in the Japanese game of Gō (“What Gō is to philosophers and warriors, chess is to accountants and merchants”). Indeed when the Second World War breaks out, Takashi sends Hel (now Nikko, not Nicholai, because of the Japanese difficulty with the ‘l’) to Japan to train in Gō with Takashi’s close friend and Seventh Dan Gō player and teacher Otake-San. Through Gō, Hel learns strategy, tactics, and the art and science of combat. 

And we also get an early sense in the young Hel, of what will drive and define the older Hel: “ the egoism of a young man brought up in the knowledge that he was the last and most rarefied of a line of selective breeding that had its sources before tinkers became Henry Fords, before coin changers became Rothschilds, before merchants became Medici.”  And what more vivid personification of the parasitic “merchant” class than the Anglo-Saxon West, and in particular the United States of America ?  The country which also flattened Hiroshima, where the love of his life was living at the time.

Post-war Japan is brought to life through the eyes of Hel, the principal occupying forces being America and Russia.  Japanese finesse, culture, art and history is rapidly Americanised, and much of its former subtleties are sacrificed.  The Russians are not much better, and it is clear that the post-war years were essentially a dirty carve-up between the West and the Soviet Bloc.  Hel is stateless, and has no papers.  Although he manages to get some fake ones for a while, and works as a code breaker for the Americans.  But eventually US-Soviet politics intervenes, and a chain of events sees him tortured and kept in solitary confinement for three years, for no particular good reason.

Fast forward to the late seventies, and Hel has a new nemesis. 

By this time he has carved out a successful career as a highly paid assassin and is now in retirement at his castle deep in Basque Country.  He tends to his garden and his concubine Hana (the “Dominique Francon” to Hel’s “Roark”).  He has become an expert caver and spends his days exploring the deepest caverns with his close and hearty friend Beñat Le Cagot.

He is popular in the area, and is well-protected. It is surely impossible for anyone to get near his castle without everyone in every neighbouring village knowing.

The attraction of this novel is that you feel Hel to be the hero, despite his occupation.  We are the product of our upbringing, and our circumstances, and it makes you realise that it is possible to forgive someone, or understand someone, if society has totally cut them out. A blond-haired man of aristocratic birth who completely absorbs Eastern philosophy.

“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power.  You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity...You cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colourless, boring – but inevitably victorious...The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening.  They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”

Back to the nemesis. Well, without revealing too much, you can imagine that Fat Boy has something to do with it.  In addition, there is a debt of honour Hel owes to an old Jewish friend of his, Asa Stern, that he must repay to Stern’s niece, Hannah.  But those darned energy big business interests have other ideas.  The denouement takes us to London, and an English country house, and then back to the Basque territory so familiar to Hel for the final showdowns. 

Overall, lots to learn from this book, not least, in the tradition of Shibumi, an appetite to explore more, and get a deeper understanding of the practice of self-improvement.  Namely, how in our real lives can we strive to attain the equilibrium of “casual elegance” ?  For that I would recommend you read “The Shibumi Strategy” by Matthew E. May, also reviewed on this blog page, here.

The Wikipedia link to Shibumi by Trevenian is here.

My one liner: Some of the passages can be a little jarring. But you need to ignore that, as the author has attempted a remarkable feat here, in attempting to unify the karmic mysticism of Kabbalah with the undiscovered potential of quantum mechanics. With some substantial success. 

The author Jane Jensen is a computer scientist and computer games author, so I was optimistic that she would make a good stab at exploring, in fictional form, the possibility that future research in quantum physics will draw us to understand the past, present and future of human destiny.  And then I read the awful opening paragraph of the book. 

“Denton Wyle was seriously re-examining his choices...his back pressed hard against the cabin of the rescue ship as sea spray slapped him on the cheeks like an outraged Englishman...” Eh ? Come again.  But please, persevere with this, it really is worth it.

“One of the keys to deep wisdom is that there are only a few patterns in all of creation, and they are repeated over and over.  The planets revolve around the sun just as the electrons in an atom revolve around the nucleus.  The whorls of a seashell mirror those of galaxies.  ‘As above, so below.’  The Micro is a mirror image of the Macro....The physical world is made up of dualities: male / female, hot / cold, day / night, birth / death.  There is no ‘itness’, no ‘beingness’, which does not have an opposite.  Science has proven this true at every level of life: there is no particle without a corresponding antiparticle, no force without a counterbalance” From the Book of Torment by Josef Kobinski, Auschwitz 1943.

This duality forms the central thesis of the novel.  The heroine and hero are University of Washington Professor Jill Talcott, a young, driven quantum physics researcher of dysfunctional family provenance, and her loyal assistant Nate Andros (yes, an amorous interest does develop, sort of).  Talcott is secretively researching wave mechanics and energy pools (which the conventional scientific community finds laughable).  The Department of Defense (a non-public branch of the US military-government complex) is on to her. In the form of the equally dysfunctional Lt Calder Farris, who has almost super-human physical strength, and will stop at nothing to get hold of her research. 

Talcott has convinced her covetous and jealous departmental heads to let her test her wave equation on the department’s supercomputer. After the obligatory Eureka moment she and Nate discover the “One-Minus-One” wave theory which predicts the behaviour of all sub-atomic particles based on the interaction of wave-particles in higher dimensions.  Their insight is that space-time itself also has a particular type of wave pattern. It is rectangular rather than sine-wave (hence crests are “plus ones” and troughs are “minus ones”).  If radio waves are blasted out from an emitter in a form which exacerbates this wave pattern, in a way that makes both the crests and troughs more pronounced, then they can alter the nature of matter itself.  Their initial experiments are conducted in a basement lab on rats, fruits, cultures, and since they are both present in the lab, then by definition, themselves.  The results do indeed show behavioural changes in the subjects.  As the power of the emissions are increased on the plus side the subjects respond positively, becoming healthier and showing greater reproductive tendencies.  But increasing on the minus side has the opposite “evil effect”.  What if events, which are essentially groups of waves, also can also be similarly grouped into “good” and “evil”, and be manipulated accordingly ? The scientists start to grasp the fearsome possibilities that their research could unleash if it got into the wrong hands.

Aharon Handalman is an orthodox Rabbi in Jerusalem.  He has become obsessed with the life of Josef Kobinski, having found encrypted references to Kobinksi and to dangerous weapons in the ancient Torah Code.  Kobinski was a Kabbalist Rabbi sent to Auschwitz with his young son during the war. Acknowledged as a brilliant scientist, Kobinski had set out his scientific theories in a manuscript during the period of his incarceration.  “Kobinski believed that the highest spiritual path was to balance your sephirot [Tree of Life], to come into perfect alignment right down the center of the tree.  It is like a stick…which is all crooked.  It cannot go through a narrow hole.  In the case of the soul, there is also a narrow opening, at the navel, and the soul must be perfectly straight and smooth…to pass through…to escape the lower five dimensions…of good and evil.”  Handalman must make the journey to Poland to discover what actually happened to Kobinski in Auschwitz sixty years ago.  He now regrets having tipped off his friend at Mossad about his research.

Denton Wyle is a small-time Californian journalist, living off his trust fund money. A wayward, lucky, shallow womanizer.  He has drifted into writing articles on mysticism, strange occurrences, and particularly, strange disappearances. But now he thinks he has hit upon something big.  A Kabbalist Rabbi called Kobinski who seemed to have mysteriously disappeared from Auschwitz.  If he could just get his hands on Kobinski’s manuscript, whether by fair means or foul, he could really make a name for himself.

Farris, Talcott and Andros, Handalman, Wyle.  All are motivated by a different reason to understand the consequences of Dante’s Equation, and they all know that Kobinski’s papers hold the key.  And this is where the book really excels. It takes us into four parallel mini-stories, where each of the characters gets to experience those consequences first hand, to experience a world outside of his or her current existence, where the fundamental 50/50 equilibrium between good and evil of our earthly existence no longer holds.   

The author has attempted a grand project here.  She deserves congratulations for this effort.

This is the Wikipedia link for the book.